W. DENISON ROfiBUCK, F.L.S. *. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 3 
The Manchester Society is still very largely a mining-engineering 
and coalowners' society, but it is satisfactory to know that the 
Yorkshire one has developed along more purely scientific lines, 
and is a society whose contributions to geological science are of 
value and importance. 
We now come to our more immediate subject. 
The further development was now in the direction of closer 
contact with Nature, and the establishment of natural history 
societies and field clubs for the observation of local phenomena. 
Of these, the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club was the 
pioneer, followed in 1846 by the Tyneside Naturalists' Club, 
and ultimately throughout the country. 
In Yorkshire the beginning was much more obscure, and 
there is little doubt that many societies have existed, of which 
nothing has been heard beyond their own immediate district. 
The great stronghold of naturalists in those early days was 
the south-western corner of the West Riding with Huddersfield 
as its centre and radiant point, and in 1847 was founded the 
Huddersfield Naturalists' Society, which still flourishes and gives 
that town an honourable position in our annals. Huddersfield 
has never lacked a succession of able, zealous, and enthusiastic 
naturalists to keep alive the love for natural history research in 
the district. 
The artisan naturalists of this district, as well as of the neigh- 
bouring towns of Halifax, Wakefield, Barnsley, Heckmond- 
wike, etc., including many men whose labours and sacrifices 
in the study of natural history rendered them as worthy of 
sympathetic biography as any of those whom Dr. Smiles has 
immortalised for us. 
In the more remote times we had James Bolton, of Halifax, 
whose works on fungi and ferns of that parish are still of value, 
and Samuel Gibson, of Hebden Bridge, whose services as a 
collector were appreciated by men of greater education and 
scientific eminence. Then in the time of the rise of what is 
now our Union, we had such men as James Varley, John Armi- 
tage, Richard Jessop, J. Bartlam, Joseph Tindall, E. Taylor, 
Thomas Lister, Caius Cassius Hanson, Roger Earnshaw, Joseph 
Wilcock, George Roberts, to name at random only a few of the 
departed ones, to make the success of the local societies, of 
which there is little doubt many existed in the villages and 
hamlets of South-West Yorkshire. 
The principle of federation was not long in following the 
establishment of local societies, and it was in the year 1861 that 
the Association of Societies, which we now know as the York- 
shire Naturalists' Union, had its birth. Heckmondwike was 
the place, and William Talbot, of Wakefield, was the founder. 
Mr. William Talbot, with whom the idea of a federation 
of societies originated, was one of the ablest and soundest field- 
naturalists of the district, and one whose kindly and genial 
